


Roses In Winter

by LesBeLexa



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Child Death, Clexa, Eventual Happy Ending, Eventual Romance, Eventual Smut, Grief/Mourning, Heavy Angst, Linctavia - Freeform, Multi, Pain
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-02-05
Updated: 2018-02-05
Packaged: 2019-03-14 06:16:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,636
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13584033
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LesBeLexa/pseuds/LesBeLexa
Summary: Lexa Woods knows all too well that there is nothing more painful than the loss of a child, and it is a pain that she thinks she carries the burden of alone. However, death never touches just one. This is a story of the layers of stories of all who are also sharing that burden.Anya, her wife, who carries her own guilt and responsibility for what took place. Clarke, his teacher, who is grieving for her own reasons. Raven, Bellamy and Octavia Blake, Lincoln, and finally Aden’s attending physician, Abby who is also Clarke’s mother.Grief in all degrees of separation.





	Roses In Winter

**Author's Note:**

> Inspiration: Hurts Like Hell by Fleurie

There was a quiet neighborhood on a quiet street in a quiet town where it seemed nothing ever happened. And in that quiet neighborhood of that quiet street, in that quiet town where nothing ever happened and snow fell like frozen tear drops, swirling and dancing, there lay a house. A beautiful Victorian sheltered by towering oaks. On the outside, it seemed picturesque, beautiful, and very much like a home. But inside of that beautiful house in that quiet neighborhood of that quiet town where nothing ever happened and the landscape of roses were hidden in winter, there was a door that lay at the end of a hall. A door that Lexa Woods stood looking at, eyes misted over with unshed tears. Eyes of emerald sorrow that knew every detail of that one rectangular piece of wood, held in a frame by hinges, held closed by an iron will to blot out the memories. It was a pastel blue, the color of the sky that could be seen in laughing eyes, with stenciled clouds scattered here and there. Scratches and chips marred the otherwise smooth surface. And a name… His name. One she could scarcely bring herself to think, or whisper, even in the solace of her solitude.

Aden…

Lexa’s chest rose and fell with ragged breaths as her pulse quickened and she felt the tightness in her chest began to grow ever stronger, invisible fingers closing in a fist around the fragmented pieces of her heart as the sorrow rose like bile in her throat. Slender fingers gripped the plastic of the laundry basket in a white knuckled grasp as the door seemed to grow larger, looming, while everything else around her grayed, darkened. Silence swelled around her, though over the sound of her thundering heartbeat she thought she could hear him laugh…. Such a musical sound.

He’d loved to laugh.

She could scarcely breathe now, and the room felt as though it was spinning out of her control, the floor giving way beneath her feet to draw her down in the quicksand of her grief. If only she could look away, shut her eyes, block all of it out… But the brunette remained… spellbound.

“Mama..” the voice came softly, drifting through time and space. A whisper, soft and sweet that bade her to move, to open the door, to bask in the presence of the room beyond’s ghosts. And slowly she bent to place the basket on the floor before straightening. The first step seemed almost painful, but her feet continued to move forward of their own accord as her hand slowly raised until it felt the unforgiving cold brass of the doorknob beneath her palm. But she didn’t open it… Not yet. The woman drew in a breath, and rested her forehead against the door… Against his name.

She remembered painting that name while she was still pregnant with him, face glowing as she’d thrown back her head with laughter when Anya had told her she couldn’t even be sure if it was a boy since they hadn’t allowed the doctor to tell them. But in her mind it had been the perfect name for a boy or girl….Perfect as he had been perfect.

Her sobbing breaths joined her heartbeat, and she twisted the doorknob, heard the metal give way and unlatch…

“Lexa..”

The voice seemed to drift to her from somewhere above the crashing waves of her pain, reaching out to extend a hand and save her from drowning. Familiar and soft… But it wasn’t the voice she wanted. It wasn’t her baby boy.

“Lexa...don’t.”

Now there was a hand over hers, arresting it, drawing it away from the doorknob and she blinked away the stinging tears as she turned in a near daze to meet the eyes of her wife. Anya stared at her with dark eyes full of melancholy and concern. Concern that made her sick, and nausea joined the maelstrom of her body’s responses. The older woman’s expression was otherwise blank, the sharp angles made all the more harsh by the emptiness of her gaze. Should there have been comfort in it? Would Lexa have received it? Neither of them knew. The brunette yanked her hand away as if it had been burned by the contact, slowly returning to herself as numbness began to overshadow the grief she’d allowed herself to feel in the seconds before.

Anya rarely spoke of him now. It had been a year and even on his birthday she hadn’t said a word. It was as if he’d been completely erased from her mind. And she went on every day, exactly as she had before him. Lexa couldn’t understand it. Nearly hated her for it. It was in the past, she’d said. Pain was a weakness that would drag them under if they allowed it. The first time the blonde had said those words, Lexa felt a part of herself close away, shrinking inwards until she could no longer see hope of light. Anya would have done away with any trace of him if she could have, including the room, his room where Lexa knew she could still smell him if only she could be strong enough to just open the door.

“Why are you home?” she asked, her voice rough, strained with the weight of emotions she wouldn’t and couldn’t release, and her expression was devoid of warmth before she shouldered past her wife to retrieve the laundry basket she’d left in the middle of the hallway.

“The meeting ended earlier than I expected. Lexa,” Anya replied, grabbing the brunette’s arm in a gentle but firm grasp. “Are you alright?”

The question was as insulting as it was laughable. Was she alright? What defined alright? Not falling apart, or crying every few seconds? Being able to go outside or to the marketplace without thinking that she saw him? Taking the antidepressants that Anya all but forced down her throat as if that were the cure all for the pain she always felt as if had become a part of her? And the answer didn’t matter, only the pretense.

“I’m fine.”

There was a sharpness in her tone, a finality that forewarned any attempt to further the conversation would be met with all of the hostility and ire that kept the brunette from being completely numb. She could feel it, simmering there, beneath the hurt and pain. Reaching upwards to protect the fragile pieces of her that were left in a way that the numbness could not. Anger so visceral that she could scarcely stand to remain in the same room, breathing the same air as the woman she’d at one time sworn she would love for better or worse.

And there had been worse, there could be nothing worse than the tragedy dealt them..

“Lexa!”

“What, Anya?! What?! What is it that you want from me?!”

They were at the bottom of the stairs now, Anya still standing on the last step as Lexa whirled around, eyes blazing like emerald fire. The older woman stood staring a moment, expression blank, hiding the hurt and confusion that boiled within her own body, the anger that she also felt, though for completely different reasons.

She was helpless. Just as she’d been helpless to save him…. Helpless in dealing with her own pain, much less that of her wife’s. For her, it seemed better to bottle it within, to lock it away. For Lexa, it seemed that it only dug the knife deeper into the wound, carved out the flesh of her emotions, leaving her bloodied and raw. The silence beat her, mangled her, shamed and stripped her until all that was left was...this. This crippled, useless, and disturbingly fragile estrangement of souls, lost and wandering blindly in a mist. Were it a problem she could solve with numbers, or her fists, the sharpness of her own intellect, something she could touch and there would no hesitance, no uncertainty… no helplessness.

But it wasn’t…and she could say nothing. She simply swallowed and stepped down to take the basket from Lexa’s hands, leaving her to stand alone, just as she always did. Beneath the suffocating weight of words unspoken.

“Take your pills.”

Lexa swallowed thickly, her body vibrating with the restraint of her emotions, chest squeezed so tightly she felt like she was being slowly strangled. But as always, each moment brought the numbness, until once again she felt nothing at all except the rebounding echoes of the despondency that cloaked her, heard nothing but the whispers as she finally went into motion, moving as if on autopilot to begin dinner while Anya did the laundry she’d already forgotten about.

She set the table as she always did. Methodically, a ritual of habit that offered some strange sense of comfort. Before she sat down, she took the antidepressants that began to slowly dissolve in her system, rolling slowly through her bloodstream, to drag and submerge her beneath the water that blocked out sound and thought.

They sat down to dinner, at the beautifully decorated table, in full view of anyone who might pass outside. Passerbys that could look in and see the beauty of their home, completely missing the sag of their shoulders and the dark shadows of their souls that were only visible in eyes that refused to look at each other. Each in their own prisons.

If there was a God, He knew nothing of the complete destruction of self that came with loss. The hole like a canyon that only widened and deepened until the black within seemed bottomless, limitless, an abyss that they became so completely that neither of them scarcely knew themselves.

If there was a God, He had turned his back on them a long time ago. 


End file.
